The typical end-user of your IoT products wants them up and running fast, with minimum hassle once they bring them home. They don’t want to be presented with initial configuration mechanisms/options they don’t understand, and their enthusiasm quickly diminishes if…
There is no second opinion about the importance of version control, it is a must-have for any software project. The option for reversibility, concurrency and history of code edits is what makes it so crucial. I’ve been using mostly GitHub for…
As soon as I blogged about IoT and security few weeks ago, my blog got hit by a massive DDoS attack combined with daily hack attempts via WordPress’ backend and SSH. I’m dealing with both issues pretty successfully for now, but this is…
An intensive Distributed Denial of Service attack is currently undergoing on my blog, with HTTP request rates hitting thousands per minute. It all started few days ago when I received a message from my hosting service provider stating that my…
Here is a fun project for I did couple days ago: a tweeting ESP8266. The typical approach when dealing with such task (and probably the better) is to use a proxy service like ThingSpeak’s ThingTweet, PushingBox or by building proxy yourself with Node-RED or mqttwarn. It…
Connected devices and sensors are the fastest growing sources of data. Billions of records are being generated daily around the globe and data transported across networks to be consumed where needed. Security of data in transit or at still in that…
With the IoT booming nowadays, the number of connected devices grows exponentially and so does the related software that drives them. There is no doubt that Firmware Over The Air (FOTA) is a highly desirable – if not required –…
The Raspberry Pi, a $35 credit card sized computer, is a popular choice for home automation projects. I am running few of those at home myself. But what is the true cost of these, is the advertised cost of $35 really all…
I’ve already blogged about using Funky v3 and RFM-2-Pi with the HopeRF RFM69CW module, only I used it with JCW’s Jeelib as I wanted to keep compatibility with my existing RFM12B based sensor network. JCW has done great job in providing…
I’ve been meaning to try Josh’s 4-line change to the OneWire Arduino library that enables using the popular DS18B20 temperature sensor without the otherwise required external 4.7K pull-up resistor on the DQ line for quite some time now. It is sometimes…
The rumors for RFM12B’s end-of-life two years ago seem to have been highly exaggerated now and the popular RF module is still available in abundance. HopeRF has introduced a pin-compatible upgrade, the RFM69CW. The module itself offers improved sensitivity and range compared…
I am flooded with all sorts of notifications on my phone and that gets a bit annoying after time. Email, calendar, SMS, social apps, instant messengers, all sorts of push notification alerts and so forth mean I physically pick my…
I worked on creating a Internet connected humidistat last week using my open source WiFi relay project as platform. We observe quite dry air at our house, I suspect this is due to the fact that we use fan coils for heating/cooling. Humidity levels at home…
IFTTT (short for “If This Then That”) is a popular service which lets you trigger actions based on certain events that occur around the Internet. It is missing an important functionality (IMHO), namely WebHooks. A WebHook is an HTTP callback: an…
Edit: The project is now available for sale in my shop, you can grab one here: The WiFi SSR board project changed a bit and I use classical relays instead of SSRs now. The reason is that SSRs tend to…